Ralph Compton the Ghost of Apache Creek (9781101545560) Read online

  “There’s bacon and beans in the pot an’ fresh coffee,” Harcourt said. “Eat, then saddle up another pony. I’m sending you out again tonight.”

  “He ain’t gonna listen to me, boss. No more’n he done the first time.”

  “I know. But this time you’ll be carrying a note. From me.”

  Trivet nodded. “Anything you say, boss. Maybe a note will make the difference—but the deacon ain’t about to give up his nuptials.”

  As the puncher walked away, Harcourt called after him: “Heap Leggett is standing by the fire. Send him over here, will ya?”

  Trivet waved a hand in acknowledgment.

  “What’s the problem, Beau?” Leggett said. He took a guess. “Trouble with the deacon?”

  Harcourt held open the tent flap. “We’ll talk inside.”

  Leggett sat on the cot and Harcourt took his place behind a portable field desk. He reached under the desk, found a bottle and two glasses, and poured whiskey for both of them.

  The rancher studied his foreman over the rim of his glass until Leggett began to shift uncomfortably, then said, “The deacon won’t be here tomorrow.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s getting married.”

  Leggett smiled. “Who’s gonna do the marrying? Himself?”

  Harcourt shrugged. “Probably one of his crazy sons. All four of them are reverends, or so they say.”

  “He bring the herd?”

  “A thousand head, according to Trivet. He says they’re mostly scrubs.”

  “Trivet is an idiot.”

  “I know, but he knows cattle and does what he’s told. Above all he’s expendable.”

  “Beau, we got three days to push the herd to Silver Creek at the Rio Puerco,” Leggett said. “It’s a ways and the army won’t wait. They’ll buy their beef from some other outfit.”

  “Tell me something I don’t already know,” Harcourt said. He thought for a few moments. “But they’ll wait a day, maybe two, if they need the beef bad enough.”

  “I reckon they need it bad enough,” Heap Leggett said. “I hear the Apaches are starving and the young bucks are making war talk.”

  He was almost as tall as Harcourt, and just as handsome, as though both men had been cut from the same cloth.

  Leggett had first gone up the trail to Kansas when he was fourteen. Later he’d been a Wells Fargo train guard, a town marshal, and then had graduated to hired killer.

  For a three-month spell, two years before, he’d married and opened a restaurant, but it didn’t work out and his wife left him.

  But the catering business taught Leggett one thing—honest work was for losers.

  Now, as Beau Harcourt’s segundo, he made gun wages for very little effort and that suited him just fine. He’d killed seven men, and nary a one of them kept him awake o’ nights.

  Harcourt was talking again, his eye sockets and cheeks shadowed by the orange glow of the oil lamp.

  “I’m sending Trivet out again, this time with a note from me to the deacon. I want that herd here. Like you say, if we don’t deliver beef to the army on time, they’ll buy it elsewhere.”

  “Suppose he still won’t come?”

  “Then we’ll take it from him.”

  “Boss, Deacon Santee ain’t a bargain, and neither are them crazy sons of his.”

  Harcourt smiled. “I know, Heap. That’s why I hired you. It’s time you started earning your wages.”

  The rancher pulled a sheet of paper toward him and began to write with a stub of pencil. He looked up from the paper.

  “You afraid of the deacon, Heap?” he said, smiling.

  “I’m afraid of no man.”

  “Can you take him?”

  “Any day of the week, I can take him.”

  “He’s fast on the draw-and-shoot, they say.”

  “I’m faster.”

  Harcourt nodded, readily accepting Leggett’s word.

  “Tomorrow morning ride over to that ghost town—what the hell is it called?”

  “Requiem.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Make sure the wild man has moved on.”

  “Sure thing, boss. And if he’s still there?”

  “Kill him. I gave him his chance.”

  Harcourt handed the note he’d written to Ben Trivet, who had come back to the tent after finishing his dinner.

  “Can you read?” he said.

  The puncher nodded. “Some.”

  “Then read it.”

  Trivet opened the folded note.

  “‘Deacon, come on fast and bring herd. Army is waiting. Con . . . con . . .’” Trivet shook his head. He pointed to the paper. “What’s that word, boss?”

  “Congratulations.”

  “‘Congratulations on your . . . nup . . . nup . . .’”

  “Nuptials.”

  “I got it, boss.”

  “Good. Now if you lose the note you’ll remember it. Tell the deacon the army is here. Tell him Apaches are gathering in the hills and they’re painted for war. Tell him I got women and whiskey waiting. Tell him anything you damn well please; just get him here with his herd.”

  Trivet looked doubtful, but he said, “I’ll do my best, boss.”

  “Do better than your best. I need that beef.”

  After the puncher left, Harcourt poured himself a drink and lit a cigar. He wondered idly if the loco lawman was still alive after the beating he’d taken.

  He doubted it. And if he was, well, it was only a minor inconvenience that Heap Leggett would clear up tomorrow.

  He needed the timber from the town buildings to build his ranch house, where he’d install a permanent woman one day.

  A crazy man was not going to stand in his way.

  Chapter 6

  This was the time, but not the place.

  Sam Pace eased down the hammer of the Colt and laid the revolver on the desk in front of him.

  He’d kill himself at the cemetery, near the spot where his wife and child were buried. Then all three of them could lie together for eternity.

  They’d be a family again. Close.

  Pace hurt all over and he was tired beyond measure. Blood crusted his scalp and face, and his body and legs were covered with purple and yellow bruises. A deep cut gashed down his thigh, angry and red.

  The thought of the long walk to the cemetery unnerved him. He doubted he could make it that far in his present state. A little rest, then. To help his body heal. Tomorrow, at first light, he’d take the walk. His last.

  He laid his head on his arms and closed his eyes. Within seconds he was asleep.

  The candle on the desk guttered and shadows moved around the unconscious man. The wind sighed around the eaves of the office and rattled the wood shingles on the roof.

  Over to the bank, a pair of hungry coyotes ate their own kind, tearing flesh, crunching thin rib bones, their muzzles stained scarlet.

  The ghost of Requiem, silver pale in the moonlight, haunted the darkness and spoke with a voice all its own . . . a whisper . . . a creak . . . a groan . . . a lament for the doomed and the damned.

  The voices woke Sam Pace.

  He sat up, his head on one side, listening intently into the night.

  Was that what he’d heard? Was it really voices?

  He rose from the desk and glided across the rough pine of the office floor, his bare feet making no sound.

  Outside on the boardwalk, Pace heard a distant muttering . . . coming closer. The steady shuffle of feet on sand.

  He smiled, raised his arms heavenward.

  They were coming back! Dear God in heaven, the people had returned to Requiem!

  Suddenly he was in the middle of the street. Waiting.

  A cool wind sought the scrapes and cuts of his battered body, but he felt no chill, no pain, only a feeling of exaltation.

  After three long years, the folks were coming back to their home.

  Pace’s eyes searched the darkness, and gradually they appeared, moving toward him like windbl
own leaves in the distance.

  “Welcome!” he screamed, opening his arms. He wanted to hug each and every one of them. “Welcome home, folks!”

  The people came closer, a grim, silent procession.

  Pace backed away a step.

  Where were the wagons, the mule teams, the children, and the outriders?

  And where were the voices?

  Pace felt a spike of fear. Something was wrong, something terrible.

  These were not the people who had fled the town.

  These were the dead returned from the grave.

  He took a step back, then another, his arms no longer welcoming, but crossed in a gesture of protection in front of his face.

  Now, in slanted pillars of moonlight, he saw them.

  Rotting flesh hung in tatters from their yellow skulls and their skeletal frames were covered in rags. Only the eyes were bright—glowing orbs of scarlet in bony sockets.

  Women extended their arms to Pace, dressed in the gingham, flowered calico, and silk they wore when they died. But the worms had done their work. Gone were ripe lips, damp, ready for kissing. Breasts that in life had been pert and high, or had hung slack from childbearing, were gone and in their stead white ribs gleamed.

  Pace screamed. Dear Christ, where was Jane?

  The march of the dead did not falter, led by one he finally recognized, but only because the man held a tattered Bible to his chest. Around his bones the frock coat he’d been buried in flapped and his skull grinned, his eyes still afire with the light.

  Pace shrieked. “Reverend Brown, send them back!”

  His tongue long lost to worms, the preacher made no answer, though; like the rest of the unholy dead, he made an eerie moaning sound, keening like a winter wind.

  Skeletal hands reached out for Pace and he smelled the close breath of rotting flesh and the moldering earth of the graveyard.

  Burning eyes surrounded him, like monstrous fireflies in the darkness, and Pace tried to turn and run away, but he stumbled and stretched his length on the ground.

  Suddenly he knew why they wanted him. It was not to drag him to the grave. It was not to beseech his help, or seek his counsel.

  It was for a very different reason.

  They were hungry!

  Pace buried his face in the sand, moaning, as fingernails, taloned from long years in the earth, tore at the flesh of his back.

  He screamed and screamed again.

  Sam Pace woke with a start, reaching for his Colt even as he jolted upright in his chair.

  His heart hammered in his chest and his eyes were wide with fear.

  Gradually, breathing hard, he managed to calm himself.

  It had all been a dream. Just a bad dream. The restless dead had not come for him.

  Then he heard the scream.

  A woman’s scream.

  A spiking cry of mortal terror.

  Chapter 7

  Jess Leslie was sure Sally had drowned in the swamp.

  After they’d fled the deacon, Jess had stopped to rest in an ancient buffalo wallow, its sandy bottom well covered by brush and tall bunch grass. But Sally, terrified of the man, had kept on going. After a while, Jess heard men yelling, probably the deacon’s sons, and then the shouts had faded.

  At first she’d thought Sally had been caught. Only later, when she’d stumbled into the swamp, did she suspect that her friend had probably been sucked under.

  Only Jess’s discovery of a game trail through the marshland had saved her life, and now she stumbled into the darkness, gasping from effort and from sheer terror.

  If she fell back into the hands of the deacon, he would kill her. He’d told her as much, claiming that he had once gouged a woman’s eyes out after she’d cheated on him with another man, and only then did he put a bullet into her.

  As the girl staggered onward, her way dimly lit by a wayward moon that cast more shadow than light, she heard coyotes yipping close by.

  Too close.

  Had she escaped the deacon only to be ripped apart by wild animals?

  Ahead of her a narrow arroyo, stunted pines growing on its slopes, promised a road to . . . somewhere. If it wasn’t a box canyon.

  The moon’s thin light offered little help and Jess plunged ahead, cactus and underbrush tearing at her dress.

  The arroyo narrowed, then angled upward, and the girl was forced to all fours as she scrambled up the slope. Loose shingle rattled from under her feet, and brush ripped at her face. Her breath tore at her lungs as the going became steeper.

  Jess felt herself grow weaker and she was afraid of blacking out and tumbling back down the rise.

  Then a flitting shadow on top of the arroyo wall froze her in place.

  There! She saw another, moving through the darkness like a wraith.

  She recognized them for what they were—a pair of hunting coyotes.

  And she was the prey.

  Frantic now, the girl redoubled her efforts, clawing her way toward the top of the ridge.

  Suddenly it was close to her. She saw a jumble of bare rocks, a few wind-blasted cedars and above those a scattering of stars. At last, she reached the top and crawled onto the flat, a stretch of grass studded with pines.

  Jess straightened and plunged ahead, her scared eyes searching the gloom. She saw no sign of the coyotes.

  The wolf always looks bigger in the darkness, and she told herself that her eyes had deceived her. Perhaps all she saw were a pair of frightened jackrabbits. Or it was a trick of the moonlight, casting shadows just to scare folks.

  But she walked on quickly, glancing behind her often. She was only fooling herself. It had not been rabbits or moonlight back there at the arroyo.

  An instinct, as old as humanity itself, warned her that she was being stalked.

  After ten minutes of flight through the pines, Jess Leslie came upon a fast-flowing creek. She hiked up her dress and plunged into the cold water. She stopped once in the middle of the stream to splash water on her face and the back of her neck, and then waded to the other bank.

  Now the ground gradually sloped away from her and the pines gave way to wild oak and some scattered piñon and juniper.

  Here the moonlight seemed brighter, though the land in front of her lay angled in deep shadow.

  Then she saw it—a single pinpoint of light in the distance. A campfire maybe.

  But how distant? It could have been one mile or ten. She had no way of knowing.

  Jess heard a stealthy rustle in the grass behind her, and fear gave wings to her feet. She hiked up her skirts again and ran down the rise, heedless of the tree branches that slapped and swatted at her.

  Then she was on flat grassland and right ahead of her was a town.

  Sobbing her relief, Jess ran. She passed a darkened church and went on into the middle of the street.

  She stopped in a patch of shadow cast by one of the false-fronted buildings, looking around her. The light she’d seen from the rise was straight ahead of her, throwing a pale yellow rectangle onto the street.

  She prepared to run again, but the coyotes, heads down, growling, had cut her off and were now standing directly in her path.

  Jess backed away, out of the shadow and into the moonlight.

  The coyotes stalked closer, readying their attack.

  She screamed for help—then she screamed again.

  Her shrieks echoed through the silent town and came back at her. Mocking her.

  Chapter 8

  Gun in hand, Sam Pace staggered to the door and stepped outside.

  Had he really heard a scream or had he dreamed it? The street was empty, but the scent of decay lingered. It was not the stench of the rotting dead. Surely it was the smell of the decaying coyote he’d killed the night before.

  Pace, clutching on to the last shreds of sanity left to him, would not allow himself to think otherwise. He heard the scream again, a sharp, shattering shriek of fear. Hurt and stiff though he was, Pace ran in the direction of the sound.


  Moon shadows slanted across the street, a series of light and dark rectangles, one after the other, cast by the false-fronted buildings. The wind rushed past his ears, urging him onward.

  Faster. Faster. Faster.

  Another scream, followed by a series of hysterical cries for help.

  Then he saw them.

  A pair of hunting coyotes stepped from shadow into moonlight like gray ghosts. They held their heads low, weight well forward, shoulders hunched, moving slowly, intent on the kill.

  Pace saw a woman back out of a black rectangle into a patch of mother-of-pearl light, her gaze fixed on the predators, her face a blur of frightened white in the gloom.

  He yelled and fired twice into the air. The coyotes spun on him, then stood for a moment, assessing the odds. Not liking the gunshots and the man running toward them, they scampered into the darkness, trailing alarmed yips behind them.

  Pace sprinted toward the woman.

  She saw him coming and screamed.

  A naked man, more animal than human, charged at her through the malignant night.

  The woman turned and ran. But she traveled only a few steps before falling flat on her face. She tried to rise, groaned once, and lay still.

  “You fainted,” Pace said, “and I carried you here. You’re in my office.”

  He was no longer naked but had thrown on his tattered rags that Beau Harcourt’s men had left lying in the street.

  His marshal’s star gleamed on his shirtfront.

  The woman looked at him with wide, frightened eyes and fainted again.

  Carefully, trying not to irritate the cuts and scratches on his scalp, Pace shaved away his long scalp locks of hair and watched them fall around his feet like black snakes.

  He did the same with his beard, shaving close, but he spared his great dragoon mustache, once his only vanity, a Texas Ranger badge of honor that had taken him years to cultivate. This he trimmed and combed into a semblance of its old self.

  The result he saw in the mirror did not please him.